Six Southern Lehigh High School students have been chosen to perform in the Pennsylvania Music Educators Association (PMEA) district choir from February 4-6 at Delaware Valley High School in Pike County.

After competing against 750 local singers for a spot on the 200-student choir, juniors Caleigh Schmid, Lexi Brown, Lauren Jardine, Giuliana Augello, and seniors Luke Simons and Chris Smith have been selected from Southern Lehigh to perform in the elite group.

“It’s extremely competitive,” junior Giuliana Augello said, “so I’m really glad to have gotten in.”

Students seeking a spot with the PMEA district choir are required to go through an extensive audition process each year involving singing a portion of music to a panel of judges. Along with this, the performers are given sheet music to quickly sight read just before auditioning. The audition is scored twice, and the top 200 scores make it into the chorus.

“I felt relieved to know that my preparations paid off,” senior Chris Smith said. “Districts is a great time.”

After districts, which is the first division of the PMEA chorus, the audition process will become more selective for region chorus, which combines Pennsylvania’s 12 districts into six regions. After this, the six regions will form one state chorus, which is the most distinguished choir.

The audition judges are comprised of district, region, and state directors depending on the division. The judges hear thousands of auditions throughout the entire process, but can only accept 25 students for each of the eight vocal sections. This adds up to 200 singers in each choir level.

“At the first level, [the judges] can see who [the auditionees] are. At all of the other levels, it will be blind auditions,” choral teacher, and PMEA District 10 president, Mr. Matthew Wehr said.

Part of what makes district chorus so selective is the fact that all the participants must have the skill to learn their music for the festival independently. There is only a single rehearsal with the full chorus, and it takes place a day before the performance. This challenges the choir to find time to perfect their pieces.

“All I’m doing now is working on the pieces during my voice lessons on Saturdays, and there are a lot,” junior Giuliana Augello said.

While this is a high pressure situation, it has taught some of the choir singers valuable lessons.

“I’ve learned that confidence is really important,” junior Caleigh Schmid said. “If we don’t all go in confident, then the whole thing will fall apart.”

“Since I am pursuing [a career in] music, this is another step that shows the amount of progress I have made over the years,” senior Luke Simons said.

The district chorus performance will be held the first week of February at Delaware Valley High School, and the region chorus auditions will be held shortly after at a later date.

“I am honored to have the chance to advance to region choir at the re-audition stage of districts,” Simons said.

The region choir will perform from March 17-19 at Central York High School in the seventh district. For this level, there will be around 400 district choir students auditioning for the 200 spots available. Despite this aggressive competition, Mr. Wehr is confident in his students who were accepted in districts.

“I would be shocked if we didn’t have someone place regions,” Mr. Wehr said.

The Pennsylvania Music Educators Association is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to develop music education in the state. Every state in America has a music educators association which hosts its own chorus, band, and orchestra at the district, region, and state level. Because every state is familiar with these events, being accepted into district chorus is recognized as an achievement throughout the country.